Universe Today
NASA is Done Setting Fires Inside its Doomed Cargo Spacecraft
Euclid Begins its 6-Year Survey of the Dark Universe
ESA's Euclid mission was launched in July 2023 and has already sent home test images showing that its instruments are ready to go. Now, the space telescope begins mapping huge swaths of the sky, focusing on an area for 70 minutes at a time. Throughout its 6-year mission, it will complete 40,000 of these "pointings", eventually observing 1.5 billion galaxies in the sky. Astronomers will use this map to measure how dark matter and dark energy have changed over time.
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OSIRIS-REx's Final Haul: 121.6 Grams from Asteroid Bennu
Even Stars Like the Sun Can Unleash Savage Flares in Their Youth
Ground-Based Lasers Could Accelerate Spacecraft to Other Stars
Even if We Can't See the First Stars, We Could Detect Their Impact on the First Galaxies
Another Clue Into the True Nature of Fast Radio Bursts
Astronomers have used two X-ray telescopes to study a neutron star and have discovered a link between it and mysterious fast radio bursts (FRBs). In October 2022, NASA's NICER and NuSTAR missions watched a type of neutron star called a magnetar for hours and detected the release of energy from its surface as it glitched, suddenly spinning faster. At the same time, radio telescopes detected an FRB from the star. These two events are connected.
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NASA is Trying to Fix a Problem With one of Perseverance's Instruments
Intuitive Machines' Odysseus Lander Begins Its Moon Odyssey
Engineers Design Habitats for the Moon Inspired by Terminite Mounds
Radio Telescope Confirms Free-Floating Binary Planets in the Orion Nebula
Passing Stars Changed the Orbits of Planets in the Solar System
We're light-years away from the closest stars, but in the billions of years of history in the Milky Way, our Sun has come much closer to other stars. For example, a star passes within 0.8 light-years every millions years and 0.16 light-years every 20 million years. These close passes have had a collective effect on the planets, shifting their orbits and helping to explain some of the eccentricities of the planets. Some of these might even have affected Earth's climate.
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Saturn's "Death Star Moon" Mimas Probably has an Ocean Too
Dying Stars Could Have Completely New Habitable Zones
Venus "Quasi-moon" Just Got a Name. Henceforth, it Shall be Called Zoozve.
Black Holes Existed at the Dawn of Time, Birthing Stars and Encouraging Galaxy Formation
Cosmic Dust Could Spread Life from World to World Across the Galaxy
The SETI Ellipse Tells Us Where to Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations
One of NASA's Radio Dishes Can Now Track Space Lasers Too
Next Generation Spacesuit Gets Tested in Weightlessness
Water Found on the Surface of an Asteroid
Could We Live Without Kilonovae?
The Vera Rubin's Keen Eye On Our Solar System Will Inspire Future Missions
What Happened to All Those Boulders Blasted into Space by DART?
Measuring Distances in the Universe With Fast Radio Bursts
Astronomers still aren't entirely sure what causes fast radio bursts, which can briefly release a galaxy's worth of energy. However, they might have figured out how to use them to measure distances in the Universe. In a new paper, astronomers propose that fast radio bursts could be detected as they're magnified by stellar microlenses. With about 30 microlensing events, they should be able to measure cosmic distances precisely.
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CERN Wants to Build an Enormous New Atom Smasher: the Future Circular Collider
Webb Can Directly Test One Theory for Dark Matter
"Seeing" the Dark Matter Web That Surrounds the Coma Cluster
NASA Launches a New Mission to Study the Effects of Climate Change
The Event Horizon Telescope Zooms in on a Black Hole's Jet
The Event Horizon Telescope has given us amazing views of the supermassive black holes at the hearts of M87 and the Milky Way. A new image from the EHT shows another black hole at the core of the radio galaxy 3C 84. Unlike the previous targets, 3C is one of the most active supermassive black holes in our vicinity, blasting enormous jets out into the cosmos. A series of images show the power of the EHT, resolving the region around the black hole where the jets form.
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Fragments From That Asteroid That Exploded Above Berlin Have Been Recovered and They're Really Special
The Early Universe Had Small Galaxies with Oversized Black Holes
Hubble Sees a Bridge of Stars Connecting Two Galaxies
NASA's JPL Lays Off Hundreds of Workers
Did the Galileo Mission Find Life on Earth?
Although it was bound for Jupiter, NASA's Galileo spacecraft made flybys of Earth in 1990 and 1992 to get boosts in its velocity. Astronomers realized this would be an ideal opportunity to test if remote imaging of Earth would detect the presence of life. In a new paper, researchers examined over 1500 photometric measurements of Earth from Galileo, judging how well it could stand in for an inhabited exoplanet.
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NASA Gives Dreamchaser the Shakedown
The Comet vs. the Eclipse: 12P/Pons-Brooks Heads Towards Perihelion in April
Comet 12P Pons-Brooks takes center stage this Spring.
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Gravitationally Lensed Supernovae are Another Way to Measure the Expansion of the Universe
Chickpeas Grown in Lunar Regolith Are Stressed but Reach Maturity
Perseverance Gives Us One Last Look at the Damaged Ingenuity Helicopter
Could Forests Become Ultrahigh Energy Neutrino Detectors?
How Does the Cosmic Web Drive Galaxy Evolution?
A Black Hole Has Cleared Out Its Neighbourhood
Dust Ruins Another Way of Measuring Distance in the Universe
Astronomers are always searching for new ways to measure distance in the Universe, especially at the greatest distances where less is known. One method measures active galaxies blasting out ultraviolet and X-ray radiation. Another measure is X-ray radiation coming from the accretion disk around a quasar. Since both methods measure the same distance to a galaxy, they should match. But they don't, and the culprit, once again, is dust absorbing and scattering UV and X-rays.
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Astronomers See 18 Examples of Stars Getting Torn Apart by Black Holes
NASA Continues Testing its New Lunar Spacesuits
Some Young Planets Are Flattened Smarties, not Spheres.
Space Force Chooses its First "Guardian" to go to Space
Astronomers Measure the Mass of the Milky Way by Calculating How Hard it is to Escape
Several techniques have been developed to measure the mass of the Milky Way, providing a range of estimates. In a new paper, a team of researchers used data from ESA's Gaia spacecraft to measure the escape velocity of the Milky Way at different distances from the galactic center and calculated its total mass, including the dark matter halo. Their measurement of 640 billion solar masses aligns with other estimates but is on the lower end.
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NASA's Juno Probe Makes Another Close Flyby of Io
